Karl E. Weick’s research while affiliated with University of Michigan and other places

The contributions to this special issue focus on links among sensemaking, organizing, and storytelling. They are re-examined in terms of to what the authors pay attention, with what, and for what. In pursuit of linkages, authors attend to accounts of consulting failure, hearings about the recent financial crisis, life history storytelling by elite actors, conflict in a rugby team on tour in Australia, and recurring stories told by jazz musicians. With analyses of dominant stories, discursive devices, life stories, documentaries, and oral tradition, these authors aim for a deeper understanding of order, constraint, conflict, legitimation, embodiment, and distributed improvisation. An assessment of these efforts shows how they deepen, extend, and consolidate our understanding of interpretive work.

Crucial to the performance of change management is the conversion of the experience of perceptual flux into evocative conceptual hunches as well as activities that reverse this conversion. Change agents encounter problems when they work with images that incorporate too little flux and images that misplace concreteness. Reconstruing change management as a poetics of change practised by change poets is proposed as a means to emphasize the concreteness of flux, the abstractness of hunches and the reciprocal movement among them that is necessary for effective change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Change Management is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Reliability is portrayed as a situation-specific localized accomplishment that involves continuous management of significant contradictions that are susceptible to interruption. Managing for higher reliability is precarious because it involves the substitution of a conceptual order for a perceptual order. Discrete concepts simplify and lag behind continuous perceptions, which means that our grasp of events is subject to mis-specification, misidentification, and misunderstanding. The gap between discrete concepts and continuous perceptions can be reduced if attention is organized so that it is directed at failures, simplifications, operations, resilience, and expertise. These micro-dynamics are discussed as a partial infrastructure that underlies Todd LaPorte's more macro-concerns with strategy and structure in the quest for failure-free interorganizational performance.

Medical error has reached epidemic proportions, and researchers have developed insufficiently sophisticated models of safety culture to match the complexity of the challenge of safety in health care. This has left providers and researchers with an inadequate conceptual toolkit for improving safety. To rectify the resulting crisis we consolidate fragments of management research into a comprehensive and integrative framework of how patient safety is produced and sustained through safety culture. Safety culture involves actions that single out and focus safety-relevant premises and cultural practices that reduce harm. This entails (a) enabling, which consolidates the premises for a safety culture; (b) enacting, which translates consolidated premises into concrete practices that prioritize safety; and (c) elaborating, which enlarges and refines the consolidation and translation. We close by discussing the implications of our framework for future research on key issues such as efficiency-safety trade-offs, interactions among components of the framework and feedback loops.

This chapter argues here for the poetics of process-the imaginative process of creating forms out of " airy nothing" . Managerial work, it further notes, is akin to the work of a poet. Process thinking helps us pay attention to concrete details and the constitution of things. Through gerund forms of thinking we recover some of the process that generates nouns and gives us apparent stability. Nouns and verbs are best seen as co-evolving. Scholars who practice process theorizing accept reluctantly the ineffability underlying the stabilization of differences and reaffirm their commitment to draw attention to indications of nouns being unwound and set in motion as verbs, as well as verbs being wound into slower motion as nouns. The naming and the winding are the work of process theorizing just as they are the work of everyday life as organizing.

An updated analysis of the Bhopal disaster suggests that problems of abduction, awareness, reliability, and certainty were more serious than was first thought. Expanded analysis shows that the tight coupling between cognition and action, normally associated with enacted sensemaking, broke down at Bhopal. The breakdowns included a low standard of plausibility, minimal doubt, infrequent updating of both mental models and current hunches, and mindless action. The modest enactment that did occur prolonged rather than shortened the crisis. Copyright (c) 2010 The Author. Journal compilation (c) 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies.

he collapse of the roof of the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad Museum Roundhouse onto its collections during a snowstorm in 2003 provides a starting point for our exploration of the link between learning and rare events. The collapse occurred as the museum was preparing for another rare event: the Fair of the Iron Horse, an event planned to celebrate the 175th anniversary of American railroading. Our analysis of these rare events, grounded in data collected through interviews and archival materials, reveals that the issue is not so much what organizations learn "from" rare events but what they learn "through" rare events. Rare events are interruptions that trigger learning because they expose weaknesses and reveal unrealized behavioral potential. Moreover, we find that three organizing routines—interpreting, relating, and re-structuring—are strengthened and broadened across a series of interruptions. These organizing routines are critical to both learning and responding because they update understanding and reduce the ambiguity generated during a rare event. Ultimately, rare events provoke a reconsideration of organizational identity as the organization learns what it knows and who it is when it sees what it can do. In the case of the B&O Railroad Museum, we find that the roof collapse offered an opportunity for the organization to transform its identity from that of a museum to that of an attraction.

Im Gegensatz zu dem vorherrschenden Bild, dass Elemente in Organisationen durch enge und dichte Verbindungen gekoppelt seien, wird hier vorgeschlagen, dass die Elemente oftmals in loser Weise verknüpft sind. Am einschlägigen Fall von Bildungsinstitutionen soll verdeutlicht werden, dass das Konzept der losen Kopplung eine überraschende Anzahl von disparaten Beobachtungen von Organisationen inkorporiert, neuartige Funktionen andeutet, widerspenstige Probleme für Methodologen erzeugt und faszinierende Fragen für Wissenschaftler aufwirft. Ferner werden Stichprobenuntersuchungen zur losen Kopplung ebenso angedeutet wie Forschungsprioritäten aufgestellt, um die weitergehende Arbeit mit diesem Konzept zu fördern. 2

Individuals typically describe information overload as the situation of receiving too much information. Organizational scholars define overload as a state induced when the amount of input to a system exceeds its processing capacity or when information processing capabilities and the information loads encountered are mismatched. Perception plays a key role in overload as in this definition: overload is the "perceived inability to maintain a one to one relationship between input and output within a realizable future with an existing repertoire of practices and desires". Prevailing treatments of overload posit that when a system (individual or organization) is no longer able to process information and becomes overloaded, primary and secondary symptoms are manifested.